A new book charts how China forged a common national language from hundreds of dialects

A century ago, China was grappling not only with political upheaval that unseated its last imperial dynasty and paved the path to Communist Party rule, but linguistic turmoil as well.

In his new book, linguist David Moser charts China’s journey from hundreds of dialects -- many mutually unintelligible -- to the 1955 adoption of Mandarin ascommon national language, known in China as Putonghua. The book, “A Billion Voices,” is slated for U.S. publication in the fall.

Mr. Moser sat down with China Real Time to discuss the challenges of create a single national tongue – at one conference to debate the issue, fists literally flew -- how written characters have evolved for the Internet age, and why learning Chinese is no longer “so damn hard.” Edited excerpts:

Why the urgency behind 20th-century language reform?

To try and create political unity and pick up the shards of the fallen dynasty, language reform was a huge part of that. China was not unified culturally or linguistically. They'd gone millennia with an illusion of unity, because everyone read the same classical texts, but that everyone was just 1% of the population and everyone else spoke something that had nothing to do with that. So they went, "Holy s---, this is going to just fracture into many different cultures."

I once read that centuries ago, paper with writing couldn't be thrown away, but had to be burned. Do you still see vestiges of that attitude today?

China had a hard time pulling itself into the modern era with the notion that the written word should be based upon what was spoken -- that it wasn't some special elevated thing. There's a sort of fetishization of Chinese characters. It lives on in the atavistic notion we can't possibly switch to an alphabetic system. It's true there's something magical and artistic about calligraphy, but there's so much superstition about it. A language can be written in any kind of script.

[By contrast],Mao was ready to eliminate the characters. He couldn't do this in the end because the elites rose up against him and said, "You can destroy all these temples, trash the Forbidden City if you want. But the characters? That would be an injury unsustainable to the Chinese culture."

How did technology transform the use of Chinese characters?

As China began to engage geopolitically, suddenly this writing system was bumping up against the information age. I remember going to the embassy in the 1980s. To send information, the only way they could do it was to look up and send the four-character code for each Chinese character and the person receiving it would look it up. I remember the embassy people saying, ‘If this keeps up, we're going to have to switch the documents into pinyin [an official form of Roman alphabetization for standard Chinese developed in the 1950s], because this is just not working.’

Chinese characters were at a crisis point. One of the problems you had in the 1990s was simply computer memory. These character sets could take up manytimes the memory of an ASCII code, though finally in the 2000s memory wasn't the same problem anymore.

Chinese characters can be used now in a way that's much less painful. I strongly believe that informational technology has saved Chinese characters for continued use in the 21st century.

How does this compare to your Chinese learning experience?

I have a copy of the book “Fortress Besieged,” [a popular satirical novel from the 40s] that I bought around 1991. It took me six months to read. Some of those entries would take could take a minute or three to look up. The phrase "looking something up in a dictionary" no longer has any meaning. What I do on my phone and computer isn't looking up a word in a dictionary, it's pressing a function key. It's no longer that arduous a task.

I don't see any way to really absolutely eliminate the basic facts that make Chinese hard: the script and in some sense the tones. But new technology has made it possible to circumvent the whole issue of the script. It's no longer the gate that everyone must pass through. You can now just climb over the wall and ignore the gate. You see young students, reporters who've reached a level of Chinese no one could have easily reached 20 years ago.

And yet we have entire educational systems that are still trapped in this 20th-century paradigm of [printed] text. I'm a big proponent of the idea that writing by hand is no longer a basic skill [worth acquiring]. I look at my wife who's Chinese and can't write anything by hand -- ordinary characters, shopping lists. With the advent of computers or smartphones she just doesn't write by hand anymore.